reduced to the position of a tattered beggar dependent upon the favour of the lords of capital.
In the United States, which was even less affected by the war than Britain, between 1913 and 1918 the prices of fifteen leading products increased by 160 per cent., while during the same period the rise in wages was only 80 per cent.
At length, even production for war purposes began to languish for lack of coal, steel, and other essentials. In every land, the United States alone excepted, poverty was rife; hunger, cold, and ruin, were advancing all over the globe. It need hardly be said that the chief sufferers from all these evils were the members of the working class, who thereupon attempted to protest. Upon them, now, war was declared, a war waged with the whole strength of the bourgeois robber States. In every land, in republican countries just as much as in monarchical, the working class was subjected to unexampled persecutions. The workers were not